Sources, calculations and confidence tiers

For each person we track, we calculate:

• Total gross: the combined theatrical box office of every film they are credited on.
• Average per film: total gross divided by the number of credited films.
• Film count: how many credited films sit behind the total.
• Hit rate: the proportion of their films that grossed more than 100 million dollars worldwide. It measures how often someone is attached to a hit. It is not a measure of profit, and it does not depend on knowing a budget.
• Based on: how many of a person's films actually count towards their total. Appearances as themselves or in archive footage (documentaries and archive clips with no theatrical release of their own) are excluded from this count, even on the rare occasion one of them carries a gross figure; that figure still flows into the total gross, it just is not counted as one of the "based on" films.
• ROI: return on investment, again only over films with known budgets.
• Inflation-adjusted figures: an optional toggle that restates historical grosses in 2025 US dollars.

Every figure is a daily snapshot, so you can see a person's numbers the day before a release and the day after. Rankings are recomputed from these snapshots, which is what makes rank changes trackable over time.

TopLiner measures theatrical box office. It does not measure streaming.

Streaming services do not report per-film revenue, so a film that went straight to a streamer has no gross we can count. This matters most from about 2015 onwards. An actor who spent five years leading streaming films will look quieter here than their career actually was, because that work is invisible to box office data. There is no honest way around this with the data that exists today. When a credible streaming revenue source appears, we will assess it. Until then, read every number on this site as a measure of theatrical bankability, because that is what it is.

Every number on this site carries a confidence badge. This is the mechanism that keeps us honest, so it is worth understanding.

• A: multiple independent sources agree on this figure.
• B: one reliable source states this figure.
• C: estimated, or derived from one uncertain input.
• D: derived from multiple uncertain inputs, or actively disputed.

Derived figures follow a strict rule: an output is rated one tier below its worst input. If an ROI calculation uses a C-grade gross and a C-grade budget, the ROI is a D. This feels harsh until you consider the alternative, which is uncertainty quietly compounding while the badge stays reassuring. Two shaky inputs do not make a solid output, and the badge should say so.

Why agreement is not always independence

There is one restraint worth spelling out. TMDB carries financial figures, and on the films we checked they match The Numbers to the dollar. Exact agreement across thousands of figures is not what independent measurement looks like. It is what shared lineage looks like: one dataset descending from the other, or both from a common ancestor.

So when TMDB and The Numbers agree, we do not treat that as two independent sources, and the figure does not earn an A on that basis. Counting an echo as a confirmation is how false confidence gets manufactured, and the entire value of the A tier depends on us not doing that.

What the badges say

The A-D letters above are how we record confidence internally, and they stay in this methodology page and in the database. On the site itself, badges are written in plain language instead: a reader's first guess at "Tier A" tends to be a claim about the film ("a Tier A blockbuster"), not about how well-sourced a figure is, which is the opposite of what the badge is for. Both vocabularies describe the same thing, so either one resolves here.

You see on the site	Internal grade	What it means
1 SOURCE	B	One reliable source states this figure.
2 SOURCES (with a check mark)	A	Two independent sources agree on this figure exactly.
2 SOURCES ~	B	Two sources agree, within about 5%.
SOURCES DIFFER	C	Two sources disagree materially; both figures are shown, never merged or hidden.
UNVERIFIED	D	Disputed, unverified, or still in release.
ESTIMATED	C	Estimated, or derived from one uncertain input.
Identity verified	A	This person's identity has been matched and verified against a primary source.

The identity badge (whether a person's own record has been matched and verified) used to sit next to every leaderboard row as a bare tier letter. It is gone from the leaderboard now, and appears once, in plain words, on that person's own page.

No box office aggregation is neutral. These are the decisions that shape our numbers, stated plainly.

Every credited appearance counts at full weight. A post-credits cameo and a lead role both count, in full, by default. No public source reliably distinguishes cameo from supporting from lead at scale, and any weighting we invented would be an editorial opinion dressed as data. Filters for appearance size are opt-in for users who want them, and they are labelled as classifications, not facts.

What "cameo" means here. The "Include cameos" switch is on by default, so every appearance still counts. Switch it off and we set aside an appearance only when a named source calls it a cameo. We check, in this order: an editor's ruling, which must cite a source; Wikidata, where a cast entry is tagged "cameo appearance"; the TMDB credit itself, when it says "(cameo)"; and the Cast section of the film's English Wikipedia article, when it makes this person the subject of the cameo wording. The first source that says so decides, and every cameo on a person's page says which source made the call, with a link to check it. Billing position never decides. A late place in the cast list does not make a cameo, and an early one does not rule a cameo out (Brad Pitt is billed 21st of 72 in Deadpool 2 for an appearance of about a second). Wording that only hints at a cameo (a source headline, a mention elsewhere in an article, the actor's own biography) is never enough on its own: it puts the credit in front of a person to check. So do sources that disagree, and a low-billed or uncredited part in a big film that no source has called a cameo. Until someone has checked, the credit counts. Once a credit has a verdict, a change in a source does not flip it automatically; it waits for a person. "Uncredited" and "as themselves" are separate facts with their own switches: an uncredited part can be substantial, so it is not a cameo unless a source says it is. A film still counts towards a person's total if at least one of their other credits on it survives.

One person, one film, counted once. If someone directed, produced and starred in the same film, its gross enters their total exactly once. Multiple roles never multiply money.

Role-filtered rankings only count films in that role. A directing ranking counts only films the person directed. The global ranking uses their whole filmography, each film once.

Re-releases count at full weight. When a film returns to cinemas, its new gross flows into its people's totals on the days it earns. We do not discount it, because the time series already shows you the before and after, and that visibility is more useful than any weighting we could apply.

ROI uses only known budgets. We compute ROI exclusively over films whose budgets we have from a source we trust. We never estimate a missing budget, because studios systematically misreport them, and a model trained on misreported numbers just launders the misreporting. Every ROI figure states how many films its denominator actually covers.

Historical granularity varies, and the chart says so. Data before 2020 is annual. From 2020 to 2025 it is monthly. From launch it is daily. Every chart labels the granularity of the era you are looking at, so a smooth line never implies a precision the underlying data does not have.

TopLiner is a free editorial tool. We attribute everything, and the product would not exist without the sources below.

TMDB

The Movie Database supplies the identity layer: who people are, what films exist, who is credited on what, and the images you see throughout the site. TMDB supplies no box office figures. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.

The Numbers

The Numbers is our primary financial source: theatrical grosses and production budgets. They have spent over two decades building the most consistent public record of film finance anywhere, and this site leans on that work heavily. We are grateful for it.

We gather their data politely: one request every two seconds, which is stricter than their robots.txt asks for, and every figure sourced from them is attributed to them. If you find their data useful, visit them directly. Their site carries far more detail than we ingest.

Box Office Mojo

Box Office Mojo reports each release of a film separately. We read it for one thing: splitting a film's total into its original run and each re-release, and dating each re-release. For the few films where The Numbers' total leaves too little for the original run, we use Box Office Mojo's original release plus its re-releases as the total (see Sources and calculations below). We read it politely, a few seconds apart, and attribute every figure taken from it.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics

Inflation adjustment uses the BLS Consumer Price Index, series CUUR0000SA0 (all urban consumers, US city average, all items), covering 1980 to 2026. When the inflation toggle is on, historical grosses are restated in 2025 dollars using this series, adjusted from the year each film earned. October 2025 was unpublished at time of calculation and is interpolated from September and November; the effect on any figure is under 0.1%.

Wikidata and OMDb

Wikidata and OMDb are used for cross-referencing: name variants, identifier matching, and sanity checks on the primary sources. Neither supplies box office figures to the site.

Every figure on this site comes from a named source and a stated rule. This is the whole chain, figure by figure. On the site itself, the badge beside each figure opens a short version of the same thing.

A film's worldwide total. We use The Numbers' lifetime worldwide gross, which already includes money from re-releases. There is one exception. When we take a film's re-releases (as Box Office Mojo reports them) out of The Numbers' total, what is left for the original run should match Box Office Mojo's own figure for the original release. If it falls more than 1 percent short, the two sources disagree about the size of the film, and we use Box Office Mojo's original release plus its re-releases as the total instead, so that every re-release counts in full. In the dry run of 15 October 2026 this applied to 24 films. On a person's page such a film is marked "Box Office Mojo total", and its badge says why. If The Numbers' total later catches up, the film goes back to The Numbers.

Re-releases. When a film returns to cinemas, Box Office Mojo reports each release separately. We use those figures to split a film's total into its original run and each re-release, and to date each re-release to its own release. The original run is the total less the re-releases, checked against Box Office Mojo's own figure for the original release; if that check fails, the Box Office Mojo total above applies instead. A film whose re-release money we hold but cannot split counts whole at its first release, and the page says so. First release dates come from TMDB.

Time periods. On the period leaderboard, a film's original run counts in the period of its first release and each re-release counts in the period of its own release date. Where Box Office Mojo dates a re-release by year only, we place it on 1 July of that year, and the page says so.

Inflation. Under the inflation toggle, money is restated in 2025 dollars with the US Consumer Price Index (BLS series CUUR0000SA0) for the year it was earned. A film's original run is adjusted at the prices of the year 90 days after its first release, the point at which most of a film's money has come in. Each re-release is adjusted at the prices of its own year. Avatar opened in December 2009, so its original run is adjusted at 2010 prices and its 2022 re-release at 2022 prices.

A person's total. We add up the worldwide total of every film they are credited on, each film once however many roles they held. The average divides by the films with known box office. The badge on each total says how many of its films use Box Office Mojo's total and how many have dated re-releases.

Ranks. All-time ranks, and ranks over periods of three years or more, need five films with known box office, so that one film cannot make a career. In shorter periods (This year, the last 12 months, a custom range under three years) one film is enough, because a single huge release is exactly what a short period should show.

Cameos. With "Include cameos" switched off, a credit is set aside only when a named source calls it a cameo: an editor's ruling with a cited source, Wikidata, the TMDB credit, or the Cast section of the film's Wikipedia article. Every cameo label on a person's page names its source and links to the evidence.

Checks. Every film's worldwide figure is compared with TMDB's figure, and the badge beside it says whether the two agree.

Every figure on this site has a flag button. Use it.

We would rather be corrected than be wrong, and a correction from a reader is a better outcome than an error nobody caught. Flagged figures are reviewed, and where a figure turns out to be wrong we retract it rather than delete it: the old value stays in the record, marked as retracted with a reason, and the corrected value replaces it in the display. That way the audit trail survives, and anything calculated from the old figure can be traced and recalculated.

If you have spotted something, flag it on the figure itself. That routes it to review with the figure, its source and its calculation attached.